“You’re the one who came home,” said my little daughter, on the edge of tears, as she snuggled up to me in bed hoping to spend the night there.

Not that there was ever a chance I wouldn’t come back from a few nights in hospital recently; but while I was there, a little friend of hers had their mother in palliative care. She never came home.

All my daughter knew at the time was that someone else’s mum was dangerously ill. Tragically, she did not get to come.

This week my girl has had glitter sprinkled in her hair at school by that woman’s sweet little son. A couple of days later, at his mum’s funeral, he was asked to sprinkle water on the casket.

His mum was younger than me, and was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer at the end of April. She had a loving husband of 20 years (whose demeanour is nothing short of heroic) and children, seven and five.

A bunch of us school mums attended the funeral and, though I didn’t know her well as the family moved overseas for her work after kinder, and we both have jobs (so I am not at school as much as I would like), it was gut-wrenching.

Any funeral is very affecting, let alone a funeral for someone robust, vigorous and in her early 40s. Her close-knit family spoke beautifully, and with dignified grace.

But though there’s a lot of love and support around them, it was seeing her little children moving among the mourners afterwards as pictures flashed on the wall of them enjoying their mother’s full, happy and too-short life that really kicked me in the guts.

Pre-kids, when I attended funerals (which was not nearly as often, as I had the stupid idea that you were a bit of a fraud if you attended one without being a close friend or family member – now I’ve realised it is a usually much-appreciated sign of care and respect) I still grieved sincerely. But in retrospect, it seems like a different type of grief.

Having been blessed never to lose someone very close, I now recognise that that grief, usually for a friend’s prematurely-deceased parent, was real — but still, it was more conceptual.

Post kids, at least in my experience, loss is a completely different thing.

The pain in the church at the funeral of a woman a few years below me at school, who had survived cancer in her early 20s, and even conceived the miracle baby she was told she would never have – only to die with her little girl in a car accident driving near the family’s country home – was so intense it made it difficult to breathe.

I had a couple of little children at the time, and I remember getting a stress-headache so acute that I wanted to sit down for a while before driving home.

I had the same reaction at the funeral of a father aged around 40 who took his own life. Seeing his very young children putting their paintings on his coffin made plenty of us feel physically ill.

When I’ve written before about how children have changed me, I think for the better, people without kids have told me that it felt like I had marginalised or passed a passive judgment on child-free people.

So, let me be very clear: of course plenty of people who do not have children have the raw material to reach the stage of increased self-awareness, and the reduced state of self-absorption and selfishness that I feel having children is helping me to approach. It’s just that in my case I would identify having children as a turning point.

Probably, I am just highlighting my own inadequacies as a younger woman by confessing that once I had children every nerve ending felt that bit closer to the surface and as a result my ability to behave thoughtfully has improved. It is not something I could control, or that I expected.

And in a strange way, though I feel the hurts more keenly – especially the hurts you hear about happening to children and mothers, the exploitation and deprivation suffered by children, or crime or domestic violence against children – and struggle to contain my distress about these kinds of things, I am much happier in this new, more raw state.

Communication and connectedness with other people flows so much more deeply now; because part of that process has been realising just how vulnerable, and dependant on each other we all are.

I may have strong opinions and pride myself on my independence, but having seen the fragility of babies, and depended on the unconditional support of other mothers has helped me realise that when it comes down to it we’re a big tribe with more in common than I may have thought in my strong-headed twenties.

Also clear, post-babies, is that none of us is as tough as perhaps we once thought we were. But luckily, if you open yourself up to people around you (and drop the shields) very many people will answer with love, generosity and compassion.

And when one such good person, whose lasting influence you can see in the sweetness of her children, is taken away far too early – and your own little girl picks up the order of service from her funeral and has a little tear as she says, “She looks really nice” – it really, really hurts.

Wendy blogs daily at The Perch for the Herald Sun. Catch her on Twitter @wtuohy.